How do you manage sales asks for collateral with what’s really useful for the company?

The Eternal PMM Challenge! Balancing sales requests with actual business impact requires a clear triage framework. I strongly consider (and usually say yes to) requests tied to active pipeline (especially large deals), competitive response materials for live opportunities, and content gaps affecting multiple reps. Everything else gets evaluated based on data - if sales can show specific examples of lost deals or align requests with company priorities, they get prioritized. I politely decline one ...Read More

I start with asking for more context: who is the collateral for, who are the target personas/accounts and sales stages they are in. Oftentimes we have something already that sellers may not be aware of, other times the collateral already exists, but in a different format than what the sellers prefer, such as a blog vs a one pager. If there’s good justification that a different format is needed, we can create a new collateral and think about other places this asset might be useful. Such as a one ...Read More

Manage sales requests like a product roadmap: Create a spreadsheet or log of requests, and then try to size them. How many people asked for them, how significant/detailed are the topics, what would the impact on revenue be, what do existing materials on this topic look like? And similarly, what's the other work you could be using that time to invest in that would generate better results for the company? Use those inputs to create a prioritized roadmap that you can get buy-in on from Sales leader ...Read More

Generally speaking, I start with a relatively uniform bill of materials for each product to make sure we've got the basics covered in a consistent format. This includes things like pitch decks, one pagers, demo videos, claims etc. We leverage content management tools (i.e. Seismic) to monitor how/how often sales assets are used and adjust what we build based on efficacy and usage. We always listen to what our sales teams are asking for on top of this and build out a backlog, prioritizing what is ...Read More

This is a good question and I think I covered some of the criteria in my previous answer above, here. That being said, the one thing I would add is that you should try and provide a clear and open forum by which asks can be managed or responded to. This is for a few reasons: It doesn’t hurt and at the very least it’s good hygiene, no matter how big your PMM team is. It could be as easy as setting up a PMM/Sales request channel on your company Slack or setting up a Google form that invites sales ...Read More